I am proud to contribute to this year’s Live360 conference, to be held in Orlando Florida at the Royal Pacific Resort at Universal from December 2nd to 7th.

I’ll be presenting two sessions at this conference. The first is Thursday in room SQH01 called “Cosmos DB for SQL Server Pros” at 8:00am.

Microsoft’s Cosmos DB is the first globally distributed database service, allowing low-latency scalability across multiple geographical regions. As a SQL Server pro, why does this matter? SQL Server is a great multi-function database that can handle many of your tasks with ease. However, it’s not the only tool in the toolbox, and Cosmos DB is a tremendous alternative for some use cases. This introductory session explores Cosmos DB and walks you through the similarities and differences in the two platforms. We explore how to provision and design your database, insert sample data and query for specific records. We’ll review the scalability and throughput settings, and help you ramp up your DBA and development skills on this compelling new platform.

You will learn:

• The core concepts of Cosmos DB and the reasons to consider it for data requirements
• Key concepts around data design, placement and document construction
• How to query for data and process client-side

Just after this session completes on Thursday, the next session is called “Level Up Your SQL Server Cloud Skills” in room SQLH05 at 9:30am.

Think infrastructure in the cloud is still just for sysadmins? Think again! As your organization moves into the cloud, infrastructure architecture skills are more important than ever for DBAs to master. Expert knowledge of cloud-related infrastructure will help you maintain performance and availability for databases in the cloud. For example, know what an IOP is? Should you use a Database as a Service or provision a cloud-based virtual machine? How many compute resources does your database consume during a given day? Can you secure it properly? Come learn many of the key cloud infrastructure points that you should master as the DBA role continues to evolve!

You will learn:

• To identify key concepts around database platform selection, such as Azure SQL DB versus Infrastructure as a Service, and make educated recommendations for the appropriate platform
• To identify key performance metrics, such as storage performance, vCPU/DTU requirements and so on, that help with properly sizing the destination resources
• About Identifying and recognizing the key reasons to migrate databases to the cloud versus keeping them on-premises

Register for this exciting conference today! We look forward to seeing you there!